On morning walks in January we are sometimes lucky enough to have Starlings fly over us. They appear out of nowhere, presumably from nesting on the piers, heading inland. The sound is acute and fleeting, wonderful, and I've never known how to describe it. Last night, reading The Birds (1952) in Daphne du Maurier's After...

There’s a guy on the seafront who makes giant bubbles. Kids go crazy for it—maybe not just kids—and he gets a good crowd. Some days the breeze lifts them over the road and they can travel far inland to Regency Square. Which can surprise some dog walkers and their small terriers.  

Reading: The more commodified your job, the more likely AI can do it – lessons from online freelancing, The Conversation, 9 April 2026. Upwork is one of the online freelancer marketplaces. They’ve reported that ChatGPT has resulted in a decrease in low-value work, and an increase in demand for high-value work (contracts...

Ten years ago I added a reminder to my calendar to check on how this prediction was panning out: In a decade’s time computing seems likely to take the form of AR interfaces mediated by AI, using gestures and speech for inputs and the whole world as its display. Speech input has come on, and LLMs have happened. AR...

With the release of the Pagecord API, I can scratch a small itch: publishing from iA Writer to my Pagecord blog. iA Writer isn't for everything, but it's good for focus, has nice attribution tools, and more importantly, it's the editor I've somehow stuck with. I've been curious about its ability to publish to various...

This is a test post sent to my Pagecord blog directly from iA Writer. Made possible by the Micropub spec and the Pagecord API. Details to follow another day.

To learn about how policy, science, and markets get food to the shops, I went along to last week's Brighton Cafe Sci. It featured Prof. Erik Millstone talking on the science and politics of food security.   Highlights: Good news: because bacteria in food make you ill quickly, the food industry does a good job of using...

I don't recall seeing so many white bluebells before, but it's probably normal.

I'm working on a machine learning cancer classification problem, but we have only a handful of positive cases in the data. Thankfully. But that fact does make my job harder. It causes three main problems: We may not have enough variety to be able to find the true patterns in the data. This is a fundamental blocker, and...

Over the weekend, we were back in Margate (mainly Cliftonville, actually) to sort through the family home. It was good to see it buzzing. A bit of sunshine always helps. GB Pizza was just right, and we were able to see the sun set over the sand. A couple of surprising things. First, I've never seen the tidal pool...

Alice Pellerin has opened my eyes with the lovely post: your hex editor should color-code bytes. I don't hexdump very often, but I've installed Hexyl for when I next need to:

The streaming schedule for Artemis II is out over at NASA Live, but with GMT times. I've made a copy and used +TIME(1,0,0) to get BST from the GMT times. I'll try to watch some of it: Launch on 1 April, 23:24 (maybe) Daily highlights at 8am or 9am seem reasonable. On Monday 6 April the lunar observation from 19:34...

Of course I don't understand this work simulating the cell cycle for a bacteria, but it looks incredible: (The title of my post comes from the source code for the simulation).